I worked at Intel for several years. I really enjoyed myself most of the time and got to work on interesting things.
Because I was not serious about staying at Intel for a long time, I took a lot of risks that made my experience more fun. Most people probably wouldn’t do so.
There was significant beaurecratic bloat and overhead, the whole organization felt stodgy and a lot of the people simply weren’t doing their jobs. This caused me to feel like I constantly had to cross lines I didn’t want to cross in order to execute at a decent pace. I come from a startup background and couldn’t tolerate the endless delays and lack of responsiveness I saw there.
From my part of the company I mostly had a good time but I did see that I would not have a good time at many other parts of the organization. There are a lot of dead product lines with no future that need to get cut. No two ways about it. Cutting those products won’t be fun.
Ossified is a good word for many parts of the company.
I feel like the cultural harm caused by some of the layoffs left many people disenchanted. I heard one ex Intel employee say something like: “I got laid off because I am just another old white man.” That sentiment really is corrosive, I heard of that several times.
Unfortunately, I think the successor to BK is going to be saddled with some ugly clean up work. Or they could be cowards and continue to turn the same crank for wall street. BK cleaned some of the mess (and created several new ones), there are many more to clean.
It’s easy to be too pessimistic.
Intel has unbelievable engineering skills under the hood. They are incredibly dangerous if they are able to shake this off and re-energize.
I hope they find a truly progressive leader and don’t continue their descent into mediocrity.
Because I was not serious about staying at Intel for a long time, I took a lot of risks that made my experience more fun. Most people probably wouldn’t do so.
There was significant beaurecratic bloat and overhead, the whole organization felt stodgy and a lot of the people simply weren’t doing their jobs. This caused me to feel like I constantly had to cross lines I didn’t want to cross in order to execute at a decent pace. I come from a startup background and couldn’t tolerate the endless delays and lack of responsiveness I saw there.
From my part of the company I mostly had a good time but I did see that I would not have a good time at many other parts of the organization. There are a lot of dead product lines with no future that need to get cut. No two ways about it. Cutting those products won’t be fun.
Ossified is a good word for many parts of the company.
I feel like the cultural harm caused by some of the layoffs left many people disenchanted. I heard one ex Intel employee say something like: “I got laid off because I am just another old white man.” That sentiment really is corrosive, I heard of that several times.
Unfortunately, I think the successor to BK is going to be saddled with some ugly clean up work. Or they could be cowards and continue to turn the same crank for wall street. BK cleaned some of the mess (and created several new ones), there are many more to clean.
It’s easy to be too pessimistic.
Intel has unbelievable engineering skills under the hood. They are incredibly dangerous if they are able to shake this off and re-energize.
I hope they find a truly progressive leader and don’t continue their descent into mediocrity.